Professor Sorel Reisman chairs the Standing Committee for the IEEE Computer Society Signature Conference on Computers, Software, and Applications (COMPSAC), serves as a tenured professor of information systems in the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences in the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at California State University (Cal State), Fullerton, and as managing director of MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), a project of the Cal State University Chancellor’s Office.

Professor Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed chairs the COMPSAC Steering Committee and serves as a professor of computer science and director of the Ubicomp Research Laboratory at Marquette University. The two professors recently participated in a joint interview during COMPSAC 2017 in Turin, Italy, on the impacts of Big Data, disruptive technologies and how COMPSAC 2017 contributes to IEEE’s mission to advance technology for the benefit of humanity.

Three peer reviewed conference papers are accepted for publication in the the IEEE Computer Society Signature Conference on Computers, Software and Applications (COMPSAC), 2017. This year the conference is taking place in Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy from July 4 to 8. The title and the first author of the accepted papers are listed below-

Marquette University’s 136th Commencement ceremony was held on Sunday, May 21, 2017. Ubicomp Lab member Md. Osman Gani joined the commencement this year. Gani was awarded his doctorate degree. Congratulations Dr. to Gani! He will be joining Miami University Ohio in Fall 2017 as a visiting assistant professor.

This year at the Annual International Computers, Software & Applications Conference (COMPSAC) was held in Atlanta GA. Ubicomp Lab had two papers and one poster accepted in the conference. Congratulations to all!

Marquette University’s 135th Commencement ceremony was held on Sunday, May 22. Seven Ubicomp Lab members joined the commencement this year. Congratulations to all the graduates! Among the graduates Ferdaus Kawsar and Jahangir Alam Majumder received their doctoral degree. Here is the photo. Five masters students were among the class of 2016. Congratulations to ABM Kowser Patwary, Nadiyah Johnson, Ola Claire Bangole, Taskina Fayezeen and Mohammad Kaykobad. Here is a photo of all the graduates.

A collaboration between Ubicomp Lab, the Dryhootch Project and the Medical College of Wisconsin was recently presented on WISN (Channel 12 News). The project featured was a smartphone application designed to help identify problems veterans may be facing after returning to civilian life.

The article explains the application as follows:

“Engineers at Marquette University partnered with Dryhootch and the Medical College of Wisconsin to create a smartphone app that will help reach military veterans on their level. It is being designed to ask daily questions that can help an assigned human mentor spot issues early on.

“We needed to develop something where we talk to them in their own language,” Reynolds said.

She said the group’s mission is to create an app that can reach a veteran 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Zeno Franco of the Medical College and Dr. Iqbal Ahamed of Marquette University are working on the project.

“It’s the technology, plus the Dryhootch run Pure Mentor Program brought together in a single package, and we think that’s a much more powerful approach,” Franco said.”

Ubicomp lab member Ivor Addo recently attended this years’ Research in Adaptive and Convergent Systems Conference, in order to present his paper “PriSN: A Privacy Protection Framework for Healthcare Social Networking Sites.”

Ivor has made two other trips earlier this year to present papers. One trip was to the 3rd International Conference on Mobile Services earlier this year to present his paper, “A Reference Architecture for Improving Security and Privacy in Internet of Things Applications.” The other trip was to the 23rd IEEE Internationa Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication to present his paper “Applying Affective Feedback to Reinforcement Learning in ZOEI, a Comic Humanoid Robot.”

Ubicomp Lab member Drew Williams has recently been awarded a $10,000 scholarship on behalf of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and the Intel Foundation. This competitive award is only given to 5 students a year.

Lab members Nadiyah Johnson and Melih Bilen were interviewed recently for ProjectMED, a project with the goal of raising interest in science and research careers amongst middle and high school students. The video of the interview will be shown on the AAMC’s Youtube channel. Congratulations!